The Wars Against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad by John Simpson Pan £7.99, pp433

John Simpson's road to Baghdad for the Iraq war proved not merely hard, but very nearly fatal when he and his team were victims of American friendly fire that killed 18 people, including the BBC man's translator.

This is recalled in detail with his pithy views on US military training and attitudes that helped cause it. But the hard road of the title refers equally to the brutal route to power taken by Saddam Hussein. Having spent 20 years reporting Iraq, Simpson is well placed to examine the dictator's rise and fall, from his days as an emergent player to his removal from a hole in the ground.

Simpson's view of the double standards of Britain and the US to Saddam will not win him fans in the White House or Number 10. For anyone else, this is essential, compelling reading.

Grandes Horizontales by Virginia Rounding Bloomsbury £8.99, pp337

Only the French could coin a term that's both elegant and bluntly descriptive for women who made a living from lying on their backs. Grandes horizontales were courtesans, an elite among prostitutes, whose golden age was between 1852 and 1870 when the distinction between Parisian high society and prostitution became blurred.

Rounding focuses on four of them, trying to separate the reality from the myths surrounding Marie Duplessis, Apollonie Sabatier, La Pava and Cora Pearl. Each attracted huge notoriety, fame and wealth. All were extraordinary and, in a later age, might have had equal success in vertical careers.

Kafka's Last Love byKathi Diamant Vintage £8.99, pp402

Dora Diamant was the young woman who shared Kafka's final year of life, a wife in everything but name who lived with and nursed him as he lost his battle with TB. At his insistence, she burnt many of his papers, a loss some critics have found hard to forgive. Even after his death, Kafka remained in many ways the defining figure in her life, throughout her career as a politically active, struggling actress in Berlin, her later marriage and attempts to flee persecution as a Jew, first to Russia and then Britain.

Kathi Diamant makes no secret of the lack of objectivity with which she approaches this biography of her near namesake. While failing to unearth any relationship between them, the result of her 15-year obsession is a testament to one woman's love for a man she knew for only a few short months.